Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday March 15, 2012 @07:52PM
from the you've-lost-that-buzzing-feeling dept.

sciencehabit writes "Offer a male fruit fly a choice between food soaked in alcohol and its nonalcoholic equivalent, and his decision will depend on whether he's mated recently or been rejected by a female. Flies that have been given the cold shoulder are more likely to go for the booze, researchers have found. It's the first discovery, in fruit flies, of a social interaction that influences future behavior."

no need to be sexually deprived. you have two hands, you have a computer hooked to the Free Porn Spigot a.k.a internet. sure, the satisfaction is shorter than sex with a partner before strong urges reappear, but you can at least enjoy quantity over quality.

If they are the same sort of horse flies I experienced when growing up they are vicious bastards. They will bite anything that moves and the bites hurt. Not itchy like a mosquito bite, but actually painful. I can't imagine Beyonce being too pleased about this. Not that I care or anything...

I made the same mistake. I really don't think it's so much of a dyslexic moment as much as it is that you probably see the word "files" on a regular basis and so your brain is more likely to initially think that word when you're quickly skimming headlines. There's also a general lack of context until you get down to the bit about fruit flies, that unless you're reading very slowly, and deliberately, it's not a difficult mistake to make. There are plenty of interesting examples that illustrate how our brain

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Not actually determining the order of "e, i, l" is probably common in humans reading this title, so some people will just pick "files" since it fits all the data they've gathered at a glance. Also, "i" and "l" are so close that the two alternatives are hard to distinguish, leading to more errors. Neither of these issues falls under the term dyslexia. While it's common to call letter transpositions dyslexia, the term actually means something quite different. It roughly translates to "difficulty with words" and generally denotes difficulty reading caused by neurological problems (as opposed to, say, poor instruction). Just to fight social stigma, I should mention that dyslexia is essentially uncorrelated with intelligence--dyslexics tend to read more slowly and have trouble spelling, but they're not on average either smarter or stupider.

[Note: I'm not sure if the quote above is actually supported by academic research, though there's clearly at least some truth to it. snopes [snopes.com] isn't sure either. Really one should ask a linguist.]

Except they identified a particular protein that is created in these depressed males that causes them to turn to alcohol. Considering ~50% of fly proteins have homologs in humans, it may be a good target for drugs in the future. Still think it's a useless study?

One of the interesting things I learned from reading Mary Roach's *Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex* (ISBN-13: 978-0393064643) is that it's very difficult for researchers to get funding for research that has anything to do with sex. Scientists resort to stratagems like including "physiology" in study titles, or simply paying for their research out of their own pocket.

You oughtn't have to make a special "applicability" argument to research on sex, given that it is not only an important part of human welfare, it's fundamental to the survival of most life forms on Earth. Anything like that *other* than sex would not be controversial in the least. We don't demand an immediate explanation of why a researcher is interested in anatomy, genetics, nutrition or non-reproductive physiology, but sex research is automatically assumed frivolous until proven otherwise.

Now I wouldn't want to draw too confident a physiological or genetic parallel between Drosophila melanogaster and human behavior. Perhaps we'll find out it is mere coincidence that alcohol plays a special role in Drosophila reproductive behavior (these are *fruit* flies, after all). That it has humorous parallels with human reproductive behavior doesn't negate the scientific value of knowing more about this extremely important research species.

On the other hand, there might be something other than coincidence at work here, and that would be *very* significant.

In either case, our discomfort with our *own* reproductive behavior has no bearing on the scientific value of research like this.

While you perhaps could have been more eloquent, you have a point. Malnutrition is a terrible problem and needs to be more effectively addressed on an international level. Allowing people fleeing hunger in their home country refugee status in other countries would help, as would more thoughtful subsidy policy, better access to seeds and fertilizers, less social stigma about being poor, and more efficient use of existing resources. To be fair, the number of malnurished people has generally declined over the last several decades as a fraction of world population so something is being done about the problem, but there's still nearly a billion people (yes, three times the population of the US) who suffer from malnutrition each year.

On the other hand, there several arguments in favor of this research:
* One never knows when and where pure research will pay off. Science builds on previous work, so who knows what will become of this? Is it inconceivable that a more effective method of dealing with mosquito-borne malaria might come of this? That's just one possible route to an application out of innumerable ones, most of which I can't conceive of now.
* Many believe knowledge has intrinsic value beyond practical applications. I agree. Stupidity is humanity's single worst plague, and it is fought with both knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. Spreading science--which ideally embodies evidenced-based, rigorous reasoning--by funding scientists fights stupidity effectively (though scientists could stand to be better communicators, on the whole).
* Other branches of academic research have even less hope of achieving applicability. Literary analysis and some corners of math and theoretical physics come to mind. Why pick on this one?

Its far from politically correct to say these things, but for decades study after study has consistently shown women are the root cause of many of society's woes. Everything from cheating to sexual divients, and even rapests and serial killers frequently share a common factor - hateful rejection by women throughout their teenage years. The fact is, a lot of women simple don't reject, they scornfully spur wouldbe suitors.

Later, many women use sex as a weapon. This is directly equatable to conditional love. T